Flat flexible cables or ribbon cables are becoming more widely used in products such as typewriters, printers and microcomputers due to cost and ease of manufacture, and the need to accommodate component movement. The use of such flat ribbon cables requires them to be joined to other cables or circuit boards, most commonly by the use of plug-in connectors. With the reduced cost of flat ribbon cables, the connectors have become a very significant portion of the cost of the overall ribbon cable/connector assembly. In those environments where the cables are permanently attached to the circuits or other cables and do not need to be removed, connectors represent a substantial and unnecessary expense of manufacturing and assembly.
Also, it is becoming more commonplace to create circuits on flexible substrates to permit their conformation to other than planar shapes, and it is desirable to connect flat ribbon cables to these flexible circuits without the use of plug-in connectors. The use of connectors of a conventional type consume space which may be limited in the product.
Using commercially available products and techniques, connections may be made between flat ribbon cables with exposed flat conductors and other similar cables or rigid circuits having a uniform circuit pattern by using SCOTCHLINK Connector Tape available from 3M Corporation. SCOTCHLINK Connector Tape is a substrate which has on one surface thereof vapor deposited silver to form a conductive path, and then is coated with a heat sealable adhesive. Deposited onto the heat sealable adhesive are microscopic silver spheres such that when the material is used to bridge between two conductors, the adhesive holds the conductive bands in the appropriate spatial relationship and orientation to the conductors being connected and through heat and pressure is permanently bonded to the conductors. At the same time, the pressure forces the silver spheres to penetrate the adhesive layer and interconnect the vapor deposited silver conductive layer and the circuit or cable conductors.
The SCOTCHLINK Connector Tape connection is dependent upon the adhesive power of the adhesive coating to maintain continuity after the splicing has occurred.